Renowned New Delhi-based artist celebrated at ACCA

Mithu Sen is one of India’s most renowned contemporary artists, and her recent exhibition mOTHERTONGUE is officially showing at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA).

The exhibition is part of ACCA’s annual international series of solo exhibitions by influential artists, and the West Bengal-born, Delhi-based artist surveys works from the past 15 years of her art practice alongside major new commissions.

ACCA artistic director and CEO Max Delany, who also curated the work, said ACCA was very excited to be presenting the works of such a distinguished and intriguing artist.

“Mithu Sen’s practice occupies both intellectual and emotional registers – at once sensual, intimate and bodily, whilst equally conceptual, critical and subversive,” he said.

Extending from conceptual art to glitch poetry and performative media interventions, and from daring, libidinous drawings to graphic works which condemn the prevalence of communal violence and marginalisation in Indian and wider global society.

Sen is well-known for exploring myths of identity through performative interventions, and ultimately challenging political language and social conventions within the art world.

Through mOTHERTONGUE, Sen displays an amalgamation of complex artworks that question social, political, economic, or emotional structures of the world.

Presented as a mind-map, moving between interior states and visible surfaces, the works withstand defined categories and test the relationships between guests and hosts, participants and performers, and the artist and her audience.

As an artist with a long list of highly regarded and awarded works around the world, Sen credits moving to New Delhi more than two decades ago as a “defining moment in her artistic journey”.

Being the capital of India, New Delhi is home to diverse cultures and populations, including an anglophone art world, and it is Sen’s experience and time within the city that has influenced a lot of the works now seen at ACCA.

Sen’s exhibition mOTHERTONGUE, commissioned by ACCA and presented in partnership with Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi, opened on April 22 and will run until June 18. •

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